This package doesn't contain resolution logic. We'll probably want a package containing a value store based resolver/publisher and go-ipns may be the right place for that.

I believe due to the gx dependencies in this (ipfs/go-ipns) it is incompatible while using github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/namesys in the same package. I'm currently playing around with IPNS for the first time and tried using this package to create records, while also being able to publish/resolve them on a live system, which requires the usage of github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/namesys but there are type errors preventing compilation.

When using the command line and publishing an IPNS record using ipfs name publish..... you receive back 2 parameters, one is the IPNS hash itself, the other is the value that the IPNS hash resolves to. Currently, I can't seem to figure out a way to pull the IPNS hash off of *pb.IpnsEntry

peer.IDFromString was removed from libp2p, as it is almost always used incorrectly, see libp2p/go-libp2p-core#274.

This repo uses it in

I'm not 100% sure if it's used correctly here or not, so I can't submit a fix. This needs to be resolved before we can update the IPFS stack to go-libp2p v0.22.0.

So, in order to do any meaningful review I need to ask a lot of boring questions (@Stebalien you knew what you singed up for when you asked me to review), I can't find much information about any of this, I'm reading the README,

Utilities for creating, parsing, and validating IPNS records

What is an IPNS record? (I should even ask what IPNS really is.)

Once you have the record, you’ll need to use IPFS to publish it.

What does it mean to publish it?

The documentation posted is just a GoDoc link with not much meaningful information.

Feel free to reply with just a link where I can read about all of this (please don't let it be a 3 year old closed issue like the one google throws when asking it).

I think it would be really helpful to add one or two usage examples to the README, e.g:

import (
	"time"

	util "github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs-util"
	ipns "github.com/ipfs/go-ipns"
	crypto "github.com/libp2p/go-libp2p-crypto"
)

// Is there a more generic way to create the needed private key than requiring go-ipfs-util/go-libp2p-crypto?
seed := util.NewTimeSeededRand()
privateKey, publicKey, err := crypto.GenerateKeyPairWithReader(crypto.RSA, 1024, sr)

// Create an IPNS record that expires in one hour and points to the IPFS address
// /ipfs/Qme1knMqwt1hKZbc1BmQFmnm9f36nyQGwXxPGVpVJ9rMK5
ipnsEntry, err := ipns.Create(privateKey, []byte("/ipfs/Qme1knMqwt1hKZbc1BmQFmnm9f36nyQGwXxPGVpVJ9rMK5"), 0, time.Now().Add(1*time.Hour))
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

We’re trying to make sure every repo has a description (see ipfs-inactive/docs#55) and this repo is missing one. I don’t have permissions to add it, but I’d suggest something like:

Tools for creating, parsing, and validating IPNS records

This package should be thoroughly reviewed. To make it a bit more general-purpose (less libp2p-record specific), I've refactored it quite a bit.

So recently, I published a directory to IPNS then added a file to the directory. After I checked IPNS again, the file did not show up. I know that with IPFS it behaves similarly to version control; the hash is different each time the contents of the directory are changed. My understanding with IPNS was that this was supposed to be a way of more stably pining directories to a single hash identity (correct me if I'm mistaken).

Basically, I've been trying to create an application with an IPNS-based back-end. The previous back-end was previously made with Node.js and MongoDB, and the front-end connected through a localhost gateway. I've been attempting to at least get a stable read-only version of this web app where a nested directory on IPFS/IPNS behaves similarly enough to an API spec.

(NOTE: please let me know if there is any other information you would prefer about this problem. I can add the specific commands and files that were used as well. If you want to see the full documentation of the API spec I'm trying to replicate, I can add that as well. I just didn't want to prematurely cause information overload)

This repo needs a few examples.